Is your people strategy up to the job?

In a consultancy business, having the right people is critical. You are selling your people’s time, based on the capability that they bring. Without great people, there simply isn’t a business.

Having a people strategy in place enables you to align your approach to talent planning within your business with your broader business objectives. So we invited Caroline Boston, Managing Director of New Minds, to talk our members through what makes up a people strategy and the key questions to ask themselves as they build it, and then to help them assess their people strategy against seven key criteria.

What is a people strategy?

“In the simplest terms,” explained Caroline, “a people strategy is the definition of who you need in your business to deliver against the objectives in your business plan and then how you will find them, and what you will do to engage and keep them in order to drive the performance of your business.”

For guidance on the ‘who’, Caroline referred everyone to our previous sessions ‘Structuring your business for success’ and ‘Optimising the balance of employees and associates’.

How to evaluate your people strategy

Words used by our members to describe their people strategy included ‘immature’, ‘reactive’, ‘evolving’ and ‘strained’. So to identify the ‘how’, Caroline shared a people strategy evaluation tool in which attendees rated themselves against seven key components.

Here is Caroline talking through the ‘Reward’ element of the strategy.

Throughout the framework, Caroline shared lots of specific ideas for consulting firms to take away and implement to enhance their people strategy, depending on their size and level of maturity. She left the audience with an important recommendation:

At the end of the webinar, questions and discussions between Caroline, our growth experts and our members included:

• what is the optimal time to review/revisit your people strategy
• whether someone who resigns before the end of the bonus year should receive their bonus, and the impact your decision has on the other teams members
• how to retrospectively adjust job descriptions if they weren’t clear from the outset
• the differentiators that make an exemplar people strategy.

The full recording of Caroline’s session, along with recordings of our previous events, are available to members via the Growth Hub. Non-members can read summaries of all our events via the Recent events.